Bernard Utudjian : About Bricks & Flowers  will be your third personal exhibition at the galerie Polaris, after ‘Chinese Landscape Project’ in 2011 and ‘Wicked Flowers’ in 2013. This new series, is again a response, like each of your exhibitions, to a voyage or a discovery of a new material or form. I think of your journeys to Jingdezhen in China, which inspired several of your works, such as your series ‘Chinese Landscape, as well ‘complets’ or columns bearing bowls which were very fashionable by the end of the nineteenth century and gave birth to your ‘Tangs Family’ or your latest series made out of bricks: can you tell us what struck you during this discovery ?

Clémence van Lunen : I started off working with hollow bricks. These bricks had an interior architecture; I cut them, I glue them and I assemble them. I play with the solids and hollows, the different industrial cuts and their rhythms.
This leads to a sharp finished product, close to metal maybe? far from the work in the series ‘Wicked Flowers’, these pieces were modelled from shapeless sandstone and worked rather roughly, with traces of the hand-to-hand still present. Here, nothing is the same, little traces of intervention.
I equally played with the irregularities of raw brick earth, directly provided from the quarry in the forest. There is also certainly the influence of a voyage to Albania, where the themed vases of pageantry often returns. It is very important for me to always search for new languages, especially if the one previously used had known some success
However, despite all the constancies, Frédéric Bodet (curator at “ Manufacture de Sèvres, cité de la céramique “) told me my flower bricks continue to show a more animal than vegetable vitality .( …/…) Extract from the catalogue about Bricks and Flowers – 28 pages, May 2016 – Galerie Polaris

Humorous, mischievous, these oversized floral arrangements stand up to academic standards. As do the numerous areas of raw clay left uncovered before firing and further appear through enamel which flows like a sweet coloured sap. Clemence van Lunen didn’t choose these soft colours randomly. They add audacity to the insolence given by the artist to petals and stems. The stems seem to be vases with exaggerated shapes or is it the vases that take the shape of curved, bulging, unsteady stems? Fleeing from lessons of realism, with the series Wicked Clémence van Lunen reveals the immense pleasure she experiences when modelling clay into voluptuous shapes, and the power of the irony which reside in  her works.